Self-appointed guardian of democracy

Now that seven American pro-democracy workers have been allowed to post bail and return to the US, perhaps we can examine what the US was up to in Egypt using reason instead of patriotic emotion. The Egyptian furore over such seemingly idealistic work may strike Americans as wild and idiotic, but in fact, the Egyptians have a right to be suspicious.

America's attempt to promote democracy around the world through private organisations has unsavoury beginnings and a sometimes troubling history. The programme stems from a discredited CIA operation. In the 1950s and ‘60s, during the Cold War, the CIA set up a group of phony foundations to funnel CIA money to private groups that were either anti-communist or, at least, non-communist.

Among the recipients were the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), the National Student Association and the magazines Encounter in London and Transition in Africa. Some did not even realise they were operating with CIA subsidies. When the secret operation was exposed in Ramparts magazine and other US publications, there was great embarrassment, and president Lyndon Johnson put a stop to such CIA funding.

But many in Congress felt that the programme's problem lay only in its ties to the CIA. Cut those ties and make everything aboveboard, they argued, and the attempt to win hearts and minds to the American way would be useful and benign. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy to take the place of the defunct CIA programme.

Under the law, the endowment divided its money among four new institutes created to sponsor programmes encouraging democracy throughout the world. The four institutes were run by the Republican party, the Democratic party, the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Delicate matter

It was obvious that spreading democracy in foreign lands was a delicate matter that needed to be handled with great care and tact, but the endowment fumbled this right away. It allocated $1.5 million to the AFL-CIO's institute for a programme in France, but did not announce that the funds were going there.

The AFL-CIO official handling the grant in Paris was 74-year-old Irving Brown, credited with using CIA money after the Second World War to help prevent the communists from taking over the major French labour unions. Brown gave most of the endowment grant to Force Ouvriere, an anti-communist labour federation. He also gave $575,000 to a right-wing student group that plastered Paris with posters attacking Francois Mitterrand, the socialist president of France.

When a Paris newspaper exposed Brown's role in the campaign, an embarrassed US embassy denied it was a government programme. But the funds, of course, did come from the US government. Since then, there have been accusations of interference in elections or plebiscites by the National Endowment for Democracy in Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, Costa Rica and what was then Czechoslovakia. Congress appropriated $118 million for the endowment's 2012 budget. In Egypt, the four US organisations under attack were all connected to the endowment.

The GOP's International Republican Institute and the Democratic party's National Democratic Institute are among the groups that make up the endowment's core constituents. The two other indicted groups, Freedom House and the International Centre for Journalists, receive funds from the endowment.

The history of the National Endowment for Democracy would not be unknown to Fayza Aboul Naga, the minister of planning and international cooperation, who has been leading the attack against the American organisations.

Aboul Naga, a career diplomat, spent five years in New York in the 1990s as an adviser to a fellow Egyptian, UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Gali. It was not a good time and place for her to watch American democracy in action. The Clinton administration, worried about public opinion, used Boutros-Gali as a scapegoat whenever American policy went awry at the United Nations.

We don't know exactly what American activities in Egypt upset Aboul Naga and other Egyptians. The charges have not been dropped. The groups say they were registered legally and were engaged in legitimate civil society work. But a thorough evaluation is needed.

More important, the motives underlying the US funding should be evaluated as well. There is an American smugness that assumes everyone else must benefit from emulating their political system. Not everyone appreciates US interference. These private though US-government-funded institutes should not be in a country where, as seems to be the case in Egypt, they are not wanted.

— Los Angeles Times

Stanley Meisler, a former foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of United Nations: A History.